 Welcome back to theCUBE's ongoing coverage of VMworld 2021. My name is Dave Vellante. You know, I've been following VMware since the early days and one of the most interesting stories in the history of enterprise tech. One of the hallmarks of VMware over the course of its long history has been a strong number two leader. An individual who looked after operations or advanced corporate development and enhanced, if you will, expanded the eyes, the ears, the heart and the mind of the CEO. You know, at one point last decade, VMware actually had four co-presidents. Some of the most accomplished individuals in Silicon Valley have held this role and it's our pleasure to welcome in VMware's newest president, Sumit Dewan. Sumit, welcome back to theCUBE, good to see you. Thank you, Dave, great to be here. Okay, so you've been in this role for just over a hundred days after a 16 month stint as chief customer officer. So that's certainly a nice dovetail into your new role as president, give us an overview of your new role here at VMware. What are your priorities? What are the key areas of focus? SaaS, transformation, you got a lot going on. Share with us. Yeah, I think the main focus for me is to make sure our company's priorities are aligned with our customers. And in the first hundred days, my first objective was to spend as much time as possible with customers because it's a source of learning for us. It's clear speaking with customers what their challenges are and what we ought to be doing to assist them in addressing those challenges. So my responsibility, obviously, I've got all the operations part of the business which enable our customers to be successful starting from ensuring that we chart the right path for them in the sales organization all the way to making sure that they're successful with the adoption of our solutions with our services and support organizations. So spending time with the customers has been critical. And Dave, what I've learned is that customers are looking for VMware just like they have in the past be this trusted foundation for all of their innovation in the prior era, pre-cloud era through their data center and mobility technologies take that forward into the multi-cloud era which is where now is where they're building new applications taking their existing applications to the power of the cloud and across multiple clouds. And our objective is to make sure we keep providing that trusted foundation for them for the new multi-cloud era. And I'm excited about it. Yeah, me too. We're going to dig into that a little bit. So you're obviously spending time getting close to the customers of course remotely for the most part some of those big themes you mentioned but I'd like to sort of peel the onion on that maybe some of the challenges that your customers are facing in terms of actually bringing forth that multi-cloud vision and specifically what's your approach to solving those challenges? Yeah, so, you know, as we all know customers start out with this adopted started out adoption of the cloud. They started building some applications on the cloud. A lot of times these were the applications that were built which were customer facing. And there was this cloud first thinking at that point of time. But soon the customers have realized and now customers have realized that power of building new innovation doesn't just lie in one cloud because there are certain capabilities like AI and ML that maybe they get from a cloud like Google. There are certain capabilities that maybe storage and compute where maybe they prefer AWS productivity and identity maybe coming from Microsoft cloud. So the power comes in by adopting all of these services across cloud. It has lots of benefits. Innovation at the fastest possible speed for our customers. Secondly, it helps customers not necessarily risk locking in and helps manage their costs. But in this multi-cloud world, it can get very complex. Think about all the security, networking, developer experience, control. Now, this is where our customers need freedom and yet control to be able to have this multi-cloud environment managed and enabled for developer experience as best as possible. That's the problem we are committed to solving in our solution and we call that our cross-cloud services. I want to stay on this for a minute because I've been talking about multi-cloud, the subtraction layer. This is really your opportunity on the cube last year with John Furrier, he said the following, quote, multi-cloud doesn't mean you're running two different architectures on two different clouds. That's not multi-cloud. Multi-cloud means running a singular architecture on multiple clouds. Assume you're a technologist at the core. What you described is not trivial. It's a huge technical challenge. Can you talk about what VMware has to do to make that single architecture a reality? That's exactly the challenge, Dave, because you can adopt multiple clouds, but if you're doing so with different architectures, you're not getting the benefits of velocity, of building new applications fast. Security in a done in a unified fashion, operations at scale. To me, I would call that not a smart path to multiple cloud. The smart path to multiple cloud would be through a unified experience for developers. A control layer which helps you orchestrate your applications in a unified fashion for your operators. And security done in a unified or a consistent fashion so that you know that you have the right governance. That's what I consider the smart path to multi-cloud. Doing any other way would actually be not fruitful. And that's what customers have had to face with without a solution like VMware's. So we provide what I call the smart path to multi-cloud. All right, so don't hate me for this, but I want to push on this and get your point of view on record if I can, because it's an important topic. Now you've intimated that choosing a single cloud provider, it's problematic for customers. It limits the customer's flexibility and choice. And I want to unpack that a bit. And if I'm mischaracterizing your view, please correct me, but I want to understand why this is limiting. For example, if I go to AWS, I got access to primitives and APIs. I got a range of compute, storage, networking options, dozens of databases, open source tools. I get VMware cloud and AWS. So explain why this is a constraint for a customer. Yeah, it's a constraint for really three major reasons. Number one, different services are available across clouds that provide different capabilities. Sure, AWS provides very rich set of primitives. So does Azure, so does Google. And in certain cases, when you're dealing with data sovereignty requirements across different countries, so do those clouds. So the, but if you are really looking for the best possible solution for AI and ML, that may or may not sit in the cloud that you may have preferred for your compute and storage. If you're looking for identity solutions that integrate really well with the productivity applications that you have, that may not be the same cloud that you may have picked for AI and ML. You don't need to make compromises. In fact, developers don't want to make those compromises because by making those compromises, you're increasing your cost and lowering their customer experience. That's the power of leveraging innovation across cloud. Secondly, think about now, if you just build all your applications by services from one cloud and your entire business gets dependent on it. If there's risk, there's costs. And that's why customers are telling us that they have made a decision for multi-cloud. In fact, we did a recent study day. And in the recent study we found out that 73% of our customers are already running their applications on multi-cloud. If this is no longer something of a future, it's here today. They're just facing these challenges today with multi-cloud. Am I right that they're running applications on multiple clouds? But it's your job and your challenge now to be able to abstract the underlying complexity of those multiple clouds and make it appear as one. I'm assuming that's not fully happening today. Maybe that's an understatement, but that is your opportunity and your customer's opportunity. Is that a fair statement? That's exactly our mission. We are providing our customers that foundation so that they can enable multi-cloud and drive their own innovation agenda at the pace that they want to. We did that in the past for data center technologies or mobile devices. Remember, mobile devices come in different operating systems, different formats, and data center hardware from server storage and network has always come in different flavors. We have abstracted that complexity for our customers in the past to deliver innovation pre-cloud. We're bringing the same value proposition now in the world of multi-cloud. Obviously, the applications have changed. They're no longer traditional applications. Now they are more and more cloud native applications. So we have solutions for cloud native enterprise applications that continue to be the heartbeat of more, more, most customers. We have solutions for traditional enterprise applications and the new and emerging edge native applications because of just now people and workforce being anywhere. We have solutions for providing security and providing additional functions for edge native applications. So that's what we are bringing to our customers as a platform that abstracts this complexity of multi-clouds. So much to talk to you about because you're right. The applications are evolving. It's not just the standard SAP windows, et cetera. There's cloud native applications. There's data intensive applications. But I want to ask you, so in order for you to achieve that, you have to be able to exploit those primitives that we were talking about, whether it's AWS or Google, Azure, Alibaba, you've got to understand as engineers how to take advantage of whatever the cloud provider is offering and then hide that complexity from me, the customer, and then build that layer. And to do that and to accommodate all these new applications, not only do you have to have traditional, you have to have processor optionality, you got edge, you see ARM coming in. And if my understanding is that's a big part of what Project Monterey is all about is offering that optionality around different workloads. Can we dig into that a little bit? Yeah, so I think first of all, the people under appreciate or under estimate what it would be required for making sure that the complexity of all of these different cloud platforms is abstracted by VMware solution. So customers don't have to think about, what are the, what is the different storage or server or primitives that are needed on Azure versus AWS, all of that gets hidden from customers in a simplified fashion, so with our solution, okay? So, and yet at the same time, there's no compromise that customers have. They can still leverage all the native primitives and services that the different cloud providers are using seamlessly, okay? So that's very important. Now, in addition, what we are doing is we are continually making sure our platform can run the next generation of applications. We are continually innovating to do so. And that's where Project Monterey comes in. As customers build new applications, when they want to build those new applications and run emerging services that are highly sort of compute centric or network centric or are providing rich amount of data, this is where Project Monterey comes in. It enables our customers to A, take all of the traditional applications onto VMware cloud, run it on across any cloud, and then B, when they're trying to expand those capabilities into the applications, the Project Monterey enables them to do so by enabling new capabilities being powered in to the VMware Cloud Foundation. Yeah, so essentially you're building, what I would look at is a new type of cloud that comprises on-prem connections to public cloud, across public clouds, and then out to the edge. You've talked a lot about telco, the specialized needs of the telco. Clearly there's different processing requirements. You've talked about 5G. We might not always have connectivity out there. Developers need to be able to write code for that edge. So it's an entirely new world. You're essentially building out your own cloud. So you have to build in all that optionality, all the tools, and at the same time, just like the big cloud providers, you have to provide your own tooling, but also be open to providing other people's tooling. Am I getting that right? Yeah, I think you're right. In terms of the tooling part, Dave, what has happened is standards for controlling all of the infrastructure has become Kubernetes. Okay, so we have embraced that. In fact, the talent that has created the best Kubernetes at this point in time, we have it at VMware, okay? The most contributions that are being made in terms of that standard, the most interesting ones are coming from VMware. So in terms of Kubernetes, we have embraced it. And what we are seeing is tooling needs to be done in a way so that our customers can manage from infrastructure to their platform, all via code, all via standards like Kubernetes. And that's what we have embraced. While at the same time, this tooling is done in a fashion so that the entire VMware cloud and the entire VMware Tanzu platform can be controlled in a fashion that fits into customers' entire environment on how they manage it overall. Okay, so let's take that conversation to security. I don't know if you're familiar with the Uptiva chart. It's this mind-blowing, eye-bleeding chart with all the different security tools in there. And I've been watching the moves that you guys have been making, Carbon Black's an obvious one, what you're doing when end-user computing, and a number of other applications, creating a security cloud group within VMware. So that's a good example, but at the same time, customers are using all kinds of different toolings based on that chart. So are you saying it's the Kubernetes is the secret there, APIs that allow you to, if a customer wants to use Okta or CrowdStrike or whatever it is, you can incorporate that into the framework, or if they want to go all VMware, they can do that as well. Can you help us understand that? Yeah, I think our philosophy is that there are two components that are critical for making a solution help our customers take the smartest path to multi-cloud. Networking and security. So on security front, the philosophy is quite simple. These days when you're going out and buying a car, you're not getting buying the car and outfitting it with airbags and ABS and any other sort of safety features. Okay, why do we do that in the world of infrastructure and technology? It should just come as an either an option or a required component within the infrastructure itself. That's our philosophy. And so coming back to if customers say, they want to take an approach to multi-cloud, they want to make sure their developer experience, their DevOps capabilities and their infrastructure management capabilities are there across all types of three applications that I mentioned, the modern apps, the traditional enterprise apps and Edge native apps. Our approach is quite simple. Networking and security, firstly, is built in. It's integrated in. You're not installing agents. You're not managing security thing on top. You're not putting airbags into the car after the purchase. They come with the purchase. You can choose to activate them or not activate them based on your price sensitivity. Second, we have their consistent. Once you learn them how to do it for traditional enterprise applications, the same capabilities, the same security workbench, the same detection and response capabilities carry forward to cloud native applications and Edge native applications. That's the way we are thinking about for security for in our portfolio. Is the strategy submit to sort of be an end-to-end supplier of security? In other words, will you touch all parts of the stack? I mean, obviously with Carbon Black can do an endpoint, but things like identity and privilege access and governance, I mean, there's just so many pieces to the value chain. Will you try to be best to breed across that chain or do you see yourselves picking spots? No, our focus is to pick the areas that we have focused on, which is to enable customers to run, build and run and secure those applications that I mentioned, you know, the cloud native applications, Edge native applications and enterprise applications. And our focus is to be able to secure those applications, A, in a consistent fashion and B, built into the infrastructure so it's not bolted on. So that's our focus and strategy and we still have great partnerships in the ecosystem for the rest of the portfolio, for the security technology to fit in with the rest of it. We just don't think that for the infrastructure that's running these critical business applications, you should have a requirement to build these applications, build this security on top of it. And that's sort of our commitment to our customers. Got it, that makes sense. I mean, you've got a pretty clear swim lane in your infrastructure space. There might be a little gray area there, but you'll let the ecosystem take care of that if it makes sense. So I guess I would say, I look back and first of all, VMware has had amazing engineering over the years. You're very well known for that. You just mentioned some of the best Kubernetes engineers on the planet. And of course, November is a big milestone for VMware with the spin. You now will become a completely independent company again. And that's a big deal in my mind because I think this is going to be expensive. I mean, to actually do this, these are big investments that you have to make. And I feel like you're finally going to get control of your own balance sheet so you can make these investments as you see fit. So that's got to be an exciting time for you. And because I think you're going to need that free cash flow to really drive this in addition to the other things that you're going to do with buybacks and stock options, et cetera. I think we are excited about this whole upcoming spin off from Dell. Dell will continue to be a very important partner of ours. In fact, we have coded and codified what we are doing with them on innovation as well as on sales and distribution perspective together. And I think to be candid just through that agreements that we have put in place with Dell, I think the partnership could even get stronger because we have 15 statements of work where we have defined new innovation projects with Dell, for example. But at the same time, like you mentioned, we get a little bit more flexibility to be able to chart our own course which is critical in the world of multi-cloud. We are able to, not that we were constrained on but customers still always asked us about how would you continue to sustain the partnerships with the cloud and hyperscalers? That's no longer a question in customers' eyes once you're independent. And secondly, it does give us flexibility on balance sheet to be able to make investments as needed to win the agenda that we have on multi-cloud without having to negotiate. Yeah, I think it's an awesome move, of course, because certainly since the Dell acquisition of EMC, your business has even grown more with those combined companies, so we've seen that. But I liken it to the coach who has a kid on the team and the coach is extra hard on the kid. That's kind of almost the way it had to be in that relationship because your posture with the ecosystem had to be, hey, we're an open ecosystem. And so now it's sometimes kind of weird and uncomfortable. Now it's clean, it's transparent. So I'm really looking forward to the innovation that you can create with Dell, of course, but with other parts of the ecosystem, which you always have, but I'm hoping the ecosystem now leans in even more. It's always had to because you've got half a million customers and you've got such a huge presence in the market, but I think now there's going to be a little more comfort level there. So I'm really excited for that summit. Great. Hey, so this was great conversation. I can't wait to have you back. I really appreciate your time and insights. Well, thank you so much, Dave, from our perspective at VMware, you know, as I started with customers, I'm going to end sort of this thing with customers as well. Always great times, great to spend time with customers. And we truly believe we have the best platform to give our customers the smartest path to multi-cloud. And I know the feedback so far has been great. It's always great spending time with theCUBE. Thank you for having me. It's our pleasure and we wish you the best. Thank you everybody for watching. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE's continuous coverage of VMworld 2021. Keep it right there.